


liar, lawyer; mirror for you, what's the difference?

by psychedelia



Series: Cyberpunk AU [1]
Category: Daredevil (Comics), Daredevil (TV), Marvel (Comics), Punisher (Comics), Spider-Gwen (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, M/M, murderdock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 12:55:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20228182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychedelia/pseuds/psychedelia
Summary: Matthew needs work done to fix a few malfunctions; luckily, David Lieberman's alteration shop comes at high recommendation. AKA; Matthew gets surgery and David finds himself a potential new client.





	liar, lawyer; mirror for you, what's the difference?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SenkoWakimarin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/gifts).

> For Senkowakimarin/ifridiot ~ Thank you for commissioning me, darling, I absolutely loved every moment of writing this. This AU is such a pride and joy piece for me~!

Matthew can almost taste the stink of this biological ape they’re visiting before they even approach the shop’s entrance, and were his mind and body harmonized, in-synch, capable of much more than just following raggedly behind Bullseye’s excited grip and frantic dancer’s steps, he’d turn tail and leave, repairs be damned. 

Grease and the cloying smell of metal, copper and plastic and titanium and iron baked into the foundations tickle at his nose and he wants to gag, wants to almost plea with Bullseye that this isn’t right, this isn’t proper, he’s not just some metal  _ thing _ to be reworked like a grease monkey’s motorcycle. But he doesn’t, because his speech has been caught lately, tumbling and twisting and falling back into old programming, programming that says  _ don’t speak, just listen _ , and he doesn’t want to embarass himself further by denigrating himself to  _ begging _ . 

“Normally I’d take you to some guy I know who works on Spider-Man and’s worked on…” Bullseye trails off, his petite hand tightening in Matthew’s a moment, and he just knows he’s avoiding saying her name, bringing the specter of  _ Elektra _ to his ears and thoughts. But she’s there anyways, like she always is, a cloud of messy emotions that likely aren’t helping his current status as a  _ broken toy _ .

He wasn’t supposed to  _ have _ them. Desires, emotions, feelings, opinions. And now he has too many and they threaten to overwhelm him, have overwhelmed him, send his brain into a frenzied fire that leaves him near catatonic and lost, half-lost in programming and half-lost in anger and reliant on the doll of a man leading him to the shop. 

Matthew isn’t certain it  _ can _ be fixed, but after Bullseye took him in, tried to fix him, there’s still… maintenance that needs to be done on his body to fix his joints, curb the pain in his limbs. 

Bullseye twists and takes both of Matthew’s hands, grinding them to a stop in front of the building that evidently houses a basement mechanic’s shop. “But, well, considerin’ who you are, and all, this human’ll be less… snoopy about it all.”

“Oh, Spider-Man’s maintenance man wouldn’t care to see a doppelganger of a famous lawyer walk into his place of business, you mean?” Matthew asks acidly, just enough heat to keep his words smooth, but there’s still a hitch in his speech, a pathetic little jump that makes him curl his lip and pull away from Bullseye, extracting his hands from his cold fingers.

“Nah.” 

“And so you bring me to a place that reeks of car fumes. How very professional. You must love me so much.” He’s not pouting. He refuses to accept that he’s pouting, but Bullseye steps up on his tippy toes and pats him on the cheek and then pulls him forward by the wrist again. 

“He’s worked on Marc before. It’ll be  _ fine _ . I’m gonna be with you and it’ll be  _ fine _ and we’ll fix your processors and your limbs and then it’ll all be good and we can go home!”

“Hm.” Matthew says, but he doesn’t protest. He’s allowed Bullseye to work on him, and even then, there’s a lot of willful ignorance in the mix, forcing his mind to believe it’s just normal first aid, instead of the reality of the situation, the wires and bolts and lightweight plastics that sit heavy as rocks beneath his artificial organs and blood vessels.

And he  _ knows _ this is his idea, a necessity if what’s to happen in the upcoming months becomes an abject reality and he gets to bathe in the blood of Wilson Fisk and the Hand and all the rest of the dirty little underground that will become his playground, but it doesn’t mean he likes it. 

Bullseye doesn’t knock, just pushes the door open, and Matthew ducks under the doorframe, pulling slightly away from Bullseye to straighten up and posture for the human heartbeat thumping in front of him. It’s hard to get his bearings in a shop like this; the smells are cloying and claustrophobic, and he’s reminded of the first month he was deprogramming, lost and waking up to Bullseye’s makeshift surgeries and careless words.

He can feel himself slipping, so he focuses solely on the man in front of him. Cautious, scared, apprehensive, but not hostile. Matthew supposes it’s the most he can hope for; besides, Bullseye will kill him in a heartbeat should he do anything tricky that compromises Matthew’s oh-so generous trust. 

Matthew fields a thin smile towards him and takes a step forward.

* * *

  
  


See, Spector said he had a friend coming over for some work and would pay a decent price, but he never bothered to mention that it would be that  _ Doll, _ Bullseye, toting a pocket knife, and a man that looks too close to Murdock for comfort. Same ginger tones, just sharper, taller, harsher in every way.

The most  _ Marc _ had said was that some wiring and physical machinery needed tweaking. Evidently for  _ Marc _ , mentioning a twin-android version of Matt Murdock was just  _ too _ much context to let David sleep easy tonight. Apparently  _ Marc,  _ once again, wanted to make David suffer.

“Don’t kick me out this time, okay, okay? Okay, Marc said he’d call ahead, and honestly, you shouldn’t kick me out this time, because I’m not even here to cause trouble this time,” Bullseye says the second he walks in through the door frame, the strange electromagnetic finger joints of his spreading far and wide as he emphasizes his words with hand gestures. 

He isn’t exactly what you’d call a ‘fan’ of Bullseye, from the uncanny nature of his body, to the general energy he holds, like he’s some primordial fae spirit that happens to inhabit the body of a plastic Doll with deadly accuracy and little to no moral compass to speak of. But, so far as he can tell, if Marc’s got him playing nice, then he shouldn’t be as much of a little prick as he normally is.

(Frank, for what it’s worth, absolutely does not know that Bullseye’s been in his shop, certain that Frank would react as though an airborne pathogen had been let loose into the space.)

David sits up a little taller and adjusts his glasses, watches as the Murdock-clone nudges Bullseye with his elbow, just slightly as he leans slightly forward on his cane.

Bullseye’s expression goes distant for a moment and the Murdock-clone frowns as Bullseye turns his head this way and that, seemingly looking around at the shop and its contents. Murdock stiffens slightly, his grip tightening on his cane, and when Bullseye looks directly at David, his lip curls backwards and he sneers, “You do augments, but you can’t even bother to wear  _ contacts _ ?”

He blinks, and steels his jaw, stepping forward slightly and frowning. “Yeah, cool, so you can always go somewhere else if you’re in the mood to bitch.” 

Murdock-clone smiles, but it’s not a particularly nice smile, sharp and dangerous and just slightly left of the natural qualities of a human smile. He hasn’t messed around with too many pure androids, but it’s not too hard to see that this is what he is; the robotic equivalent of a predatory machine just a tad  _ too  _ perfect to ever really blend in. 

“I’m Matthew. Spector said you could fix some of my… hardware.” His voice is cold, but there’s an awkward jump in the audio waves, something that tells David that there’s something off in the processing department, and the way he’s leaning on his cane seems to imply stiffness in his legs and-- 

“Yeah, yeah, I probably can. Gonna need to get inside you, though.” 

Murdock’s-- Or, well, Matthew’s, he supposes, and like fuck he’s going to ask about  _ that _ situation right now-- expression darkens, and the stiffness in his shoulders hikes up a few more centimeters. He shakes his head, as though to clear something ( _ Oh, _ David thinks,  _ he was linked up with Bullseye to see what the shop looks like _ ), and says, “Fine. But Bullseye will be here to ensure you don’t… Take liberties with your surgery.” 

“I did the best I could with him, and honestly, he was a lot worse off and it’s taken him months to be able to even walk as smooth as he can now, because he  _ really  _ broke down after he almost killed me and I almost killed him, but luckily for him I don’t die, so--” Bullseye speaks with the voracity of a starving child, and Matthew puts a hand on his shoulder, which is, as far as David is aware, the first time he’s ever seen Bullseye shut up without  _ choosing _ to shut up. Despite the excited tones, Bullseye is all but glaring at him, his expression cold and mischievous. 

Marc had told him, once, that Bullseye didn’t truly believe humans have autonomy themselves. A philosophical puzzle, for sure, but not one David particularly cares to ponder while he’s on the clock, and so long as Bullseye keeps his hands to himself, he supposes it doesn’t matter  _ what _ Bullseye thinks.

Matthew keeps his hand on Bullseye’s shoulder and says, “Just don’t mess up. It’ll go badly for you if you do. Clumsy alterations will result in clumsy retaliation.” 

He sounds paranoid, a note of hysteria tinging his vowels even outside of the vocal malfunctions, and David’d be ready to throw them both out in a heartbeat if he weren’t sure they were (1) serious, and (2) if he couldn’t leverage this over Marc’s head later.

“Just sit down. I don’t  _ do _ clumsy.” He lets his hand slap against the side of the chair that he often finds Frank in weekly, as well as Marc and the other customers that  _ don’t _ threaten him for his services in. It’s essentially a modded massage bench, something that can easily lay someone down comfortably and also leave the angle open for David to get into the machinery imbedded into necks, spines, backs, heads.

Bullseye hops onto a counter David would  _ really  _ rather he didn’t jump on, and there’s a stilted grimace on the robot’s face as he takes in the caked layers of dust and grime. It’s not that he doesn’t keep things clean, it’s more that  _ any _ garage is gonna take on these qualities. But Bullseye takes great pains to tell David just how  _ gross _ everything is here, and evidently today he’s escalating it by flicking his pocket knife over and over and over again. 

Best not to get distracted by him.

Matthew sits slowly, his posture straight and tall and tense, and David’s been doing this long enough to know when there’s a chance for instinctual…. Retaliation, as Matthew puts it.

“Just your voice and joints?” He asks, and rolls a sleeve that’s threatening to fall over his elbow higher up, watching as the android desperately looks like he’s trying not to  _ sweat _ .

He says nothing, until Bullseye says, “Matthew!” and the man jerks in the seat and turns to face David.

“I-- Yes.” 

David moves closer, and when Matthew all but flinches, he says, lightly, tactically, “You know… I could just shut you down while I work. So you don’t accidently gut me when I’m wrist deep in your brain matter.” 

Matthew’s expression turns stormy, and there’s a familiar kind of deep-seated anger that looks like it’s threatening to release itself. 

David just hopes he doesn’t have to deal with a goddamn tantrum in his shop today.

“No. I’ll be fi--” 

“ _ Matty _ .” Bullseye says, and it’s the quietest David’s ever heard him. The most serious, too. “I won’t let the human hurt you. Go to sleep.”

Matthew clenches his jaw and David, for his part, stays the  _ fuck _ out of it.

“Just make a decision, and I’ll work with whatever, man,” He says, and blinks in surprise when he’s met with a jabbed index finger perilously close to his face, as Matthew leans across the operating chair and grits too-white teeth at him. 

“Marr my skin and I marr yours. Do  _ not _ fuck this up, Microchip.” 

“...So… That’s a yes on the--” 

Matthew looks like he wants to murder him in a blind rage, and snaps, “Yes.” 

David holds back a sigh. Paranoid vigilantes and their stunted emotional strongarming. “Yeah, yeah. Just hold still. I have to get inside your neck.” 

Matthew goes silent and somehow manages to stiffen his body even more, holding back another flinch when David finally gets his hands at the back of his neck and starts prodding around. It takes a few minutes, and he’s acutely aware of Bullseye’s eerie attention the entire time.

“Finally,” Lieberman grinds out between his molars, as his fingers wrap around  _ something _ mechanic. There’s nanites and synthetic blood and goop and organs to mimic a human body, but underneath it all, there’s always something solid, mechanical,  _ artificial _ in these androids. He pulls a familiar plug from deep near his brain stem and watches as the resolute and grim expression on Matthew’s face evens out, his brain shutting down and leaving him in a state deeper than the manufactured sleep programmed into him.

“He’s asleep?” Bullseye asks, and pulls in close to where Matthew is dead to the world, the strange mixture of featureless and too perfectly featured all at once tickling at the back of David’s neck. He’s never had a chance to really poke at Bullseye’s mechanics, and has been told in no uncertain terms that he would  _ never _ be allowed to marr the aesthetics of the ‘bot’s persnickety narcissism. Past curiosity, he’s not sure he wants to-- by all rights, Bullseye is the kind of ‘bot that  _ shouldn’t _ be autonomous, and makes the world a more complicated place by the sheer fact that he exists. 

“Yeah,” David sits back and grabs a wash-cloth from the table beside them, ignoring the stains already dotting the cloth to wipe his hands of the brain fluid covering his fingers. “Fuckin’ Mazel Tov.” 

Powered down, the tension leaves Matthew’s body all but immediately, and he looks a hell of a lot smaller when he’s not all but bristled up like a territorial alley cat. Even his slack face looks sharp, dangerous, not quite close enough to Murdock to be a perfect copy. Luckily his hair’s cropped short; it makes it easier for David to poke around in the hardware in his head without being forced to awkwardly shave portions of his head.

He pulls the glasses off of his face and hands them to Bullseye, who sets them down beside him as he swings his legs back and forth on the counter, his expression hawkish as he watches David examine Matthew. He hasn’t exactly met Bullseye  _ many _ times, but the few times have been memorable and this is certainly… A change in behavior. He’s focused, for one, and honestly, he’d never have expected Bullseye to  _ care _ about anyone, second, but it’s clear in every movement, every look, that’s he’s enamored with the powered down android dead to the world in his chair. 

“Where’d he even come from? Marc hasn’t said shit,” David asks, and regrets engaging Bullseye immediately. He pulls up a chair in front of Matthew’s prone body and starts to collect his tools; first fixing the hardware causing those malfunctions, then joint repair.

Bullseye kind of cocks his head and shrugs. “Belonged to the Hand. Tried to kill me, but he couldn’t and so he broke down because his programming was preeeeeettttyy tight and his body was already falling apart and fighting me didn’t help, so I took him home.” he sniffs. “Fixed him up when I could, and he eventually Woke up all the way.”

He’s quiet for a moment, figuring out the best access to the machinery in his brain. Matthew’s put together well, clearly an expensive model and custom-designed at that, and if you didn’t know where to look, you’d almost assume he  _ was _ human. But even the nicest androids don’t have artificially grown brains yet, and eventually he makes it to the hardware without causing his brain fluid to leak out all over the floor. Counts it as a damn success, too.

“He wasn’t intended to be autonomous?” He barely looks up, just enough to glance at Bullseye and ensure that he’s still sitting on the table. He’s got an overhead light shining down on his makeshift operating table, and under the glow of the bright light, Bullseye’s features are even more uncanny and peculiar.

Bullseye leans forward somewhat, and says, “Suppose not. It’s why he had such a hard time kicking the programming and when he did he kicked it  _ wrong _ and things broke in his head. I don’t break, you know, so I didn’t even think it could happen, but he broke so  _ easy  _ and he’s already too human, besides, so--” His foot slams backwards against the counter, the metal clanging hard enough to almost make David jump damn near out of his skin. 

He talks like a rambling mess, but it’s useful nonetheless; while David can’t account for the  _ why  _ ‘bots sometimes just… gain sentience, there’s still some hardware work arounds to fix the bugs. Seems sometimes autonomy or not, there still needs to be enough  _ room  _ to house whatever… Whatever is alive in there. 

So he cleans everything up, fixes the bug, and does the human-shaped equivalent of adding extra device storage to his brain, extra memory that should at least  _ prolong _ malfunctions happening again. 

The limbs are easy, too; just some fluid swaps and oiling. Routine stuff, routine enough that he asks, “If you’ve been fixing him up yourself, why couldn’t you do all this?” 

Bullseye flicks the edge of his knife back into its sheath and out again. “Probably could’ve, but I don’t like looking at his head. Too fleshy. And ‘sides, he asked for a technician. Said he’d need one on tab soon.” 

David looks up and raises his brow. “And you thought of me.” 

“Marc thought of you.  _ I _ go to fancier technicians than  _ you _ .”

“But he wants me on tab. Why?

Bullseye flashes him a smile, the kind that makes the hair on his forearms stand up in some instinctual fear. “Doesn’t matter if you get your money, does it?”

David pulls together and stitches up the flesh in Matthew’s right knee, pausing for just a moment to mutter, “Right. Shoulda known I wouldn’t get a solid answer out of you.”

Bullseye just keeps smiling, and when he sees that David’s finishing up, he hops off the table and comes closer to them. “Let me wake him up! He won’t like reassurance from you.” 

Matthew looks groggy at first, his hands immediately shooting to Bullseye’s waist, and--  _ oh _ . David had a feeling, but wasn’t expecting it to be so blatant, so… strangely and eerily romantic. Bullseye places a palm on Matthew’s cheek and Mathew’s eyes flutter shut, and they must be speaking to one another through the meld, because neither says a word for a while, and David’s left to merely Wonder about the slightly tremble in Matthew’s hands until Bullseye pulls away and leaves him to sit up.

He gives a few preliminary stretches and arches his back somewhat, testing out the new joints and flexibility David put in. It’s not that he wasn’t built well; moreover, it seems he’s put his body through so much tension and grief that the artificial human workings were starting to grind down, almost mimicking sensations of arthritis to pool in his joints and lower back, causing some of the machinery to physically grind down. 

He swears he sees the ghost of a real, happy smile playing on Matthew’s face before he turns his attention back to David and fields him the snotty narcissistic one. “Provided I don’t find… aberrations… you’re money will be wired to you by Wednesday.” He stands, and Bullseye hands him his cane and glasses as though reading his mind. 

Considering the whole mind-meld thing, it’s not far off that they would learn to anticipate the others desires and wants. 

Sure could come in handy with the idiots David hangs out with. “Right. Well. You don’t have to threaten me next time I work on you, okay? You’re good on your money, I’m good on my work.” 

Matthew snorts and edges towards the door. As cocky and self-assured as he seems to try to make himself seem, the nervousness at which David’s shop makes him doesn’t escape him. “I’ll send Marc your best regards. Adieu.” 

And with that, they’re gone, and David all but sinks into the makeshift operating chair. His shirt has splatters and stains of Matthew’s blood marring it, and his hands feel sore from the delicate tool work he’s had to do. But-- and this is the important part-- if it means he’ll actually get  _ paid _ , then he’ll put up with it. 

At least Matthew is willing to go under, unlike a certain meathead who grits his teeth through everything, and even  _ comparing _ the two makes David smile, a tired thing that dances on his lips and makes the afternoon worthwhile.


End file.
